An enterprise services framework (ESF) provides a service-oriented infrastructure that allows for separating and isolating business logic within application architectures in a manner that allows reuse of the business logic within various situations in a flexible and easy-to-build way. An ESF service-oriented architecture includes clients which consume services provided by a server-side generic class, the service manager.
The services offered by the service manager may be constructed out of elementary pieces. These pieces and the construction principle together form the ESF interface.
The ESF interface may be an interface construction principle, which allows building arbitrary methods out of elementary building blocks.
Further, the ESF may contain an ESF repository. The ESF repository may contain the meta data for the ESF, describing the connection between the business logic implementation and the elements of the virtual programming model.
ESF may also be referred to as Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA). An ESA implementation is available from SAP AG (Walldorf, Germany). ESA features ESI from NetWeaver and many further adaptions from SAP applications (ESI=Enterprise Services Infrastructure which comprises ESF—enterprise services framework (runtime), ESR—enterprise services repository (meta data for business objects and services), and ESP—enterprise services protocol (cross system communication, web services)).